The Castaways (12 page)

“But first you must win your freedom. Without freedom—”

“I’m always on the run; I know that,” I said. “It’s the same for Midgely and the others. The Jolly Stone will buy our freedom. It may be cursed, or it may not, but—”

“Oh, it’s cursed. There’s no doubt about it,” said the King. “We’ve seen the ghost of Captain Jolly looking for his Stone, looking in the moonlight with his phantom ship at anchor in the bay. We’ve heard him wailing, Tom, and wolves sound happier, let us say.”

It was Midgely who’d told me, long ago, about the old pirate, Captain Jolly, and the terrible curse on the diamond. But he hadn’t told me—perhaps he hadn’t known—that the curse could last beyond death. “Why would his ghost keep looking for the Stone?” I asked.

“To lift the curse,” said the King. “Didn’t you know—that’s the fate for all who’ve lost it. Those who go to their graves with the Stone unclaimed will walk the earth forever.”

It turned me white, the thought of that. I felt a new urgency to unearth the Stone, to pass it on to Mr. Goodfellow. I dreaded that some small accident would befall me first, and that I would spend all of eternity in restless wandering.

“But fear not,” said the King. “Old Goods will be only too glad to relieve you of the diamond. Why, that devil—that Old Scratch!—he’d trade his soul to get it, and that’s in our favor, Tom. We have the upper hand.”

I could see that Boggis must have chattered like a magpie. Through his daughter, the King had learned every detail about how I’d found and lost the Jolly Stone, and he’d worked out a plan that would get me all I wanted. He spelled it out as the ship hurdled the waves toward England, as Charlotte and the giant Lilliputians raced across the fo’c’sle deck.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “The moment we land, we must seek out Mr. Goodfellow.”

“Do you mean you and I?”

He shook his head. Impatiently, he gave up his royal “we,” jabbing a finger at my chest, and then at his.
“You’ll
go off and get the diamond.
I’ll
find Mr. Goodfellow and bring him to the ship. I’ll help you barter a trade. Remember, Tom, I know that devil’s way of business. I can drive him to his knees.”

“What would you want in return?” I asked.

“Nothing!” said he, as though it was an insult to ask. “Only that the diamond brings a curse to that monster. He took away my comfort and my future as he took away yours, and it’s all I want to see him suffer.”

It was part of the curse that I’d be suspicious. The King might have been trying, like everyone else, to feather his own nest. But there was certainly no pretense in his hatred for Mr. Goodfellow. If anything, it was deeper than my own. He held out his hand on the bargain, and I shook it.

“Here’s to the end of Mr. Goodfellow,” he said.

I felt relieved to be sharing my burden, glad that time and sea miles had made a shipmate from this pudgy man I’d so detested. I looked at the sails, at the compass, and gave the wheel a quarter turn.

Up by the bow, Charlotte’s hair was like a splash of sunlight. She was sneaking round the capstan, not knowing that Hay-yoo was waiting to pounce.

“Look at her. What innocence,” said the King. “She was never afraid of the natives, you know. I was terrified, let me tell you. Dead within a week, I thought. Slaughtered in our beds. But Charlotte charmed them like a songbird.”

We watched the girl creep around the capstan. With a shout, Hay-yoo leapt out at her, his arms held up like a lion’s paws. Charlotte shrieked happily, and raced off in the other direction as Boggis tried to grab her.

The King laughed heartily. “He was always a fine fellow, that Hay-yoo. Almost a nanny to Charlotte.” He looked at me, then looked away. “Do you know, between you and me and the gatepost, Tom, I don’t believe there’s much difference between ourselves and the savages. It’s almost heresy to say so, but watch them with Charlotte and you see. They’re pleasant and friendly, and some are sharp as tacks. It’s a curious thing, Tom. Free a slave, and you’ve a friend for life.”

“You told me they’d murder us all if I set them free,” I said.

“Of course I
told
you that. My livelihood was about to vanish,” he said, with a toss of his hand. “Setting the slaves loose was like throwing guineas into the forest. But do you
know, I’m glad to be out of it, Tom. There’s no future in slaving.”

“It’s illegal,” I said.

“In England, yes. That’s just what I mean,” said he. “The whole business is doomed. Like the quill pen and the flintlock, slavery’s had its day. Why not, when you think about it? There’s steam engines now, and plenty of others to do the work. You’ve got your convicts and your lunatics and your children. Why go to all the trouble of gathering slaves and carting them from hither to yon?”

He said all this very pleasantly, as though there was nothing wrong with the notion that slavery was his right and his due. I thought I would despise any man who thought such a thing, but I didn’t feel any hatred. To my surprise, I found I’d become rather fond of George King.

“How did you become a slaver?” I asked. “What happened between you and Mr. Goodfellow?”

He didn’t answer right away. The ship moved along in its watery rumble, with the creaks of rope and wood, and I thought he wouldn’t answer at all. Then he sighed.

“It was the wife’s fault, Tom.” The King turned his back and spoke into the wind. “You see, we used to carry passengers to the Orient in an Indiaman, I as chief steward—and a damned good one—and she as the captain. When Charlotte was born we settled ashore. I went to work for Mr. Goodfellow, overseeing his office boys. Well, just last year—or was it the year before?—he ventured into the slaving trade. He tried to make me twist the wife’s arm so that she’d command one of his ships. I told him I’d rather twist a lion’s tail.”

The King laughed to himself. “Mr. Goodfellow tried the twisting himself, and you know the long and short of it, Tom. Much the same thing happened to your father. No one crosses old Goods without suffering for it, and isn’t that the truth? Within a month we were penniless. Within two we owed our souls to Mr. Goodfellow, and he packed us off to the slaving station. It was that, or be out on the streets. The wife would have chosen the streets if not for Charlotte.”

The King fell silent. We stood rather awkwardly, with nothing more to say, and no easy way to move apart. We both watched the sea, on opposite sides of the ship, until Charlotte scampered down the deck toward us. The King ventured another remark. “She takes all her games so seriously.”

Charlotte came skipping to the quarterdeck. “Daddy!” she cried. “Come and help me feed my dollies. We can feed Mr. Horrible too.”

The King laughed. “That’s her imaginary friend,” he said to me, taking her hand.

“He’s
not
imaginary,” said Charlotte. “He’s real.”

“Yes, of course he is.” The King winked at me as she pulled him away. “What a weedle you have for a father.”

They left me alone at the wheel. I felt the slant of the deck and the pull of the ship, and I heard the wind’s song in the rigging. A sense of contentment came over me at the thought that I had found an ally.

I should never have forgotten that the King was a liar.

Watch followed watch, and day followed day. Two thousand miles or more we sailed, and while I was thrice laid flat by sickness, I was never once scared. Mrs. King charted us past the Azores and on toward England. Then she called us all on deck one morning and told us to watch for land.

It was the first time we’d all been together since we’d weathered a storm in mid-Atlantic. Weedle looked changed, as indeed he was. Without Penny around him, he was cheerful—even friendly—and the voyage had made him a happier person. His scar would always give an evil twist to his face, but behind it, somehow, he was smiling.

Boggis went aloft, Weedle to the wheel, and we all watched for England.

Poor Midgely could not be included in our eager lookout. But he smelled land before any of us could see it, and he hauled me to the rail, pointing at an empty sea. “Look harder! Look harder!” he cried.

High above me, Gaskin Boggis hopped to his feet on the topsail yard. He jumped up and down on that wooden stick, shouting, “Land! There’s land!”

Mrs. King, her cheek bulging with tobacco, flew straight to the rigging. It was a boisterous day, and her skirts, catching the wind, bulged like a bell around her white drawers. “It’s the Lizard!” she said.

To me it was a faint speck of gray, a shard of rock that could have been anything anywhere. How I envied that she could name it, as if she had an acquaintance with every stone and sod of the earth.

She squirted tobacco juice neatly between the shrouds. “A point to leeward, please,” she shouted down at the wheel.

Weedle hesitated, jogging the wheel one way, then the other.

From Charlotte came her tongue-clucking. “Leeward means to leeward, you weedle.” She pointed toward the land. “Silly goose; turn that way.”

We passed the Lizard and ran down the Channel. With the wind in our favor, but the tide against us, we bashed through row after row of steep-sided waves. The very ship trembled, and the spray flew up from the bow.

My home looked cold and dismal, an uninviting place. It was a disappointment after the grand vision I’d been imagining for so long. But when Midgely asked me to describe it, I said it looked beautiful.

All day and all night we pressed along the Channel. Weedle and Boggis and Hay-yoo stood staring into the night. We all saw the lights of Dover in the darkness, the twinkle of thousands of candles and lamps. A strange feeling came over me, like the queasy sense of the seasickness. I’d thought I would be overjoyed to be home, but now I wished that I had another day, or another week, at sea. I was suddenly not sure that I wanted to go home at all.

The King asked me, “What’s on your mind, Tom?”

“I couldn’t really say,” I told him. “I think I’m afraid of facing Mr. Goodfellow again. Things might go badly for me.”

“Nonsense, Tom,” he said. “We’ll watch over you like your own guardian angel.”

We gave the Goodwin Sands a wide berth in the darkness, and sighted the Foreland at dawn. Like birds woken by the sun, a flock of boats came flying out from shore. In the distance they were little clouds of foam and spray, for they came with all sails set, racing each other to be first alongside.

They tacked and jibed, their hulls vanishing wholly into the seas. They shot past our bow and tore round the stern, a man calling from each, “Pilot! Pilot!”

Mrs. King chased them off. She said there was no need to lug a man “all over the blooming ocean,” and that we would pick up our pilot when we’d rounded the Foreland.

We did that at noon. We passed the point two miles off, turned to the west, and braced the yards for a reach toward the river. There, at the mouth of the Thames, we found a bulge of brown water—a huge bubble on the blue of the North Sea. I felt a change in the ship as we punctured that
bulge, crossing from blue to brown, from salt to fresh. As though from a wish to head back to the ocean, the ship slowed and veered aside, so that Boggis had to fight it with the wheel.

Then, two miles from any shore, I put down Midgely’s bucket and scooped fresh water from the sea.

The little King grimaced when he saw me lift it to my lips. “You’re not drinking
that
, are you?” he said.

It was river water, fouled with sewage, thickened by mud from the fields. I would not have drunk it for love nor money when I lived in London. But now, at the edge of the sea, it was somehow different. I fancied that I could smell all of its parts: the rain that fell on the lovely Cotswold Hills; the spray of the Temple Fountain; the bathwater of the King in his castle; the runoff from the coppery dome of St. Paul’s.

“It’s the blood of England,” I said. It was her essence, a potion of courage and strength.

I tipped the bucket and drank. Then Boggis pulled it away and did the same, and the bucket went from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, sloshing over the deck as we all drank of England’s blood.

With the current against us, and the river chopping at our bow, Calliope King finally allowed a pilot aboard. He clambered up the same ladder that had saved our loathsome castaways, that had rescued Midgely and me and the others.

He was a grizzled old salt, bundled head to toe in his heavy cloak. He went straight to the wheel and rooted himself behind it, where the deck was spotted from Calliope’s tobacco. Only inches from the helmsman, he
bellowed orders at the top of his lungs. “Larboard! Larboard! Come about!”

I thought I would stand on the deck and not move until I saw the spires of London, until I heard the bells in the churches. But our progress was terribly slow, and it wasn’t until the next morning that the land began to narrow around us. We passed the mouth of the Medway, and I remembered my terror as I’d sailed out from there in the hold of my father’s ship, a convict on my way to Australia. I looked toward Chatham for the short masts of the hulks, but saw nothing but marshes and hills.

Below the Beacon Hill, near the village where I was born, the land pressed close on either side. The pilot took us up with the tides, tacking back and forth. We sailed so close to the river’s edge that we could see the grasses bending in the wind, and twice we startled herons into flight. At each change to the ebb he dropped the anchor, and we waited for the current to turn again in our favor. There were times we gained fewer than five miles, when the flood was weak.

The long hours of waiting gave us time to think and time to talk. No longer divided by watches, we could gather as we pleased. One night, as we sat out the ebbing tide, Weedle and Boggis and Midgely and I were together in the cookhouse. There was a touch of moonlight on the marshes, and I was looking out the window when Weedle began to pester me with questions.

“What will happen when we get to London?” he said. “First thing, what will we do?” He was sitting with his back to the wall, picking at a spot of tar on his trousers. “Will we give a cove a tumble? Pick a pocket?”